Exeter City needed to defend stoutly in their League One match at St Mary’s on Boxing Day 2009. Trailing 2-0, they were reduced, on 35 minutes, to 10 men. But they dug in to restrict the final score to 3-1.The Saints’ manager, Alan Pardew, was so impressed by one of the visiting defenders, Dan Seaborne, that he promptly signed him. Devon-born, Dan had joined Exeter at 17, when they were in the Conference. Having been nurtured in loans to lesser non-league clubs, by 2008 he was captaining the side that returned to the League by winning the play-off Final at Wembley. And he was a regular as the Grecians were again promoted in 2009.

Dan made an instant debut for the Saints at centre-back, partnering José Fonte, another January-window signing. While José became a longstanding fixture, Dan would be the principal deputy for Radhi Jaidi, all the way to promotion from League One in 2011. Jaidi would not play in the 2011-12 Championship season and Dan was in possession at the end of August.

But he was then sidelined for the duration, after incurring serious injuries in a night-club incident which left him with a fractured skull and life-threatening blood clots on his brain.

Doctors were sceptical he would ever play again. In the meantime Jos Hooiveld arrived to form a substantial partnership with Fonte and we shall never know whether Seaborne might have kept his place and become part of a promotion-winning side, let alone whether he might have developed into a Premiership defender. As it was, he had to make do with sitting on the Saints’ Premiership bench, unused, a handful of times in 2012-13. The last such occasions were Nigel Adkins’s last two games in charge, when Dan was between loan spells at Championship Charlton and League One Bournemouth.

He then joined Championship newbies Yeovil Town in 2013, for a short time which was also the case at Coventry before he went north of the border first to join Partick Thistle and then Hamilton Academical. A return to Exeter was short lived and he then crossed the Irish sea to play for Derry City including a couple of game for the Candy Stripes in the Europa Cup. That was to be his last foray into the world of professional football as, by the time the country emerged for a second time from lockdown in 2021, he was the proprietor of a hotel in Widemouth Bay, near Bude in Cornwall.